Hacker News: martingoodson

New comment by martingoodson in "How to make buffet breakfasts less wasteful"

martingoodson — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:06:49 +0000

"Conclusions: This meta-analysis confirmed that skipping breakfast is associated with overweight/obesity, and skipping breakfast increases the risk of overweight/obesity. The results of cohort studies and cross-sectional studies are consistent. There is no significant difference in these results among different ages, gender, regions, and economic conditions."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31918985/

New comment by martingoodson in "Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data"

martingoodson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:16:55 +0000

People seem to be misunderstanding this paper. It doesn't claim that any previous papers have overestimated contamination. That would only happen if scientists didn't routinely use blanks as a comparison, which they do. E.g. "A procedural filter blank was created during each sample batch and analysed alongside the samples, to enumerate potential contamination that could have been introduced during the extraction process."

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/476076/1/1_s2.0_S014765132300286...

New comment by martingoodson in "People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI, study says otherwise"

martingoodson — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 16:25:47 +0000

Title needs to be changed. It completely misrepresents this research. There was no comparison between human written and AI written stories.

New comment by martingoodson in "Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice"

martingoodson — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 11:42:46 +0000

Honestly, I think if I wasn't there, she still would have loved it. She related to it like a person.

New comment by martingoodson in "Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice"

martingoodson — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 10:44:44 +0000

I played with this last night with my four-year old daughter. We had fun with asking Miles to explain what bones are made of etc.

Today, she asked "where has that robot guy gone?". Crying now because I won't let her talk to Miles anymore.

She has already developed an emotional connection to it. Worrying indeed.

What books should a junior programmer read?

martingoodson — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:02:17 +0000

When I started out the books to read were clear: code complete, design patterns, refactoring etc.

Now it's not so obvious. Am I just out of the loop or are equivalent books no longer being written?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056766

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by martingoodson in "Why LLMs still have problems with OCR"

martingoodson — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:32:03 +0000

Written by someone who knows what they are talking about.

New comment by martingoodson in "Why LLMs still have problems with OCR"

martingoodson — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:15:29 +0000

I've worked in data extraction from documents for a decade and have developed algorithms in the space. I've developed a product using LLMs for this purpose too.

This article is essentially correct.

New comment by martingoodson in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

martingoodson — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 10:39:10 +0000

I work in financial data and our customers would not accept 96% accuracy in the data points we supply. Maybe 99.96%.

For most use cases in financial services, accurate data is very important.

New comment by martingoodson in "A new type of neural network is more interpretable"

martingoodson — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 07:42:59 +0000

We hosted Ziming Liu at the London Machine Learning Meetup a few weeks ago. He gave a great talk on this fascinating work.

Here's the recording https://youtu.be/FYYZZVV5vlY?si=ReoygVJMgY9oje3p

New comment by martingoodson in "Meta AI releases Code Llama 70B"

martingoodson — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:24:40 +0000

Baptiste Roziere gave a great talk about Code Llama at our meetup recently: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_mhMi-7ONWQ

I highly recommend watching it.

Art of the Essay: Recommended Texts and Resources

martingoodson — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 21:51:06 +0000

Article URL: https://web.stanford.edu/~jonahw/AOE-SM10/AOE-Books.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766472

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by martingoodson in "EU strikes deal to regulate ChatGPT, AI tech"

martingoodson — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 18:03:41 +0000

Do you have any reference for this claim, or are you guessing? It was reported that the algorithm was a Gradient Boosting Machine by investigators who gained access to the code.

https://www.lighthousereports.com/suspicion-machines-methodo...

New comment by martingoodson in "Understanding Deep Learning"

martingoodson — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 13:22:40 +0000

I think because it's a relatively 'younger' field, there is a bit more need to know about the foundations in AI than in programming. You hit the perimeters a bit more often and need to do a bit of research to modify or create a model.

Whereas it's unlikely in most programming jobs you would need to do any research into programming language design.

New comment by martingoodson in "Understanding Deep Learning"

martingoodson — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 13:13:55 +0000

Not at all. It's something I've seen in practice over many years. Neither skill set is 'better' than the other, just different.

There is a need for people who are able to build using available tools, but who don't have an interest in the theory or foundations of the field. It's a valuable mindset and nothing in my original comment suggested otherwise.

It's also pretty clear that many comments on this post divide into the two mindsets I've described.

New comment by martingoodson in "Understanding Deep Learning"

martingoodson — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 07:57:04 +0000

Most comments here are in one of two camps: 1) you don't need to know any of this stuff, you can make AI systems without this knowledge, or 2) you need this foundational knowledge to really understand what's going on.

Both perspectives are correct. The field is bifurcating into two different skill sets: ML engineer and ML scientist (or researcher).

It's great to have both types on a team. The scientists will be too slow; the engineers will bound ahead trying out various APIs and open-source models. But when they hit a roadblock or need to adapt an algorithm many engineers will stumble. They need an R&D mindset that is quite alien to many of them.

This is when an AI scientists become essential.

New comment by martingoodson in "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO"

martingoodson — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 11:49:45 +0000

It's not about critical thinking: the employees were about to sell up to $1B of shares to thrive capital. This debacle has derailed that.

An AI for Humanity

martingoodson — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 07:43:46 +0000

Article URL: https://rssdsaisection.substack.com/p/an-ai-for-humanity

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964888

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by martingoodson in "Outperforming larger language models with less training data and smaller models"

martingoodson — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 23:36:10 +0000

Sorry! Here's the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10169

New comment by martingoodson in "Outperforming larger language models with less training data and smaller models"

martingoodson — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:48:29 +0000

We discussed this at our meetup last night. See here for paper reference and subscribe to get an alert when the recording is uploaded: https://www.meetup.com/london-machine-learning-meetup/events...